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It’s been more than a month since “The Killing” ended its first season on AMC, but reporters still have a bone to pick with the way it ended.

Joel Stillerman, AMC’s head of original programming, fielded several questions about the show’s controversial cliffhanger ending — in which the audience didn’t actually learn the answer to the show’s marketing tagline, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” He says the anger from some critics and viewers over the finale was in part a result of the way AMC sold the series.

“I think the major takeaway for us after the finale of ‘The Killing’ starts with the headline that for everybody who was frustrated, we hear you,” Stillerman says. “If we had to do anything differently, I think we certainly would have taken a different approach with respect to managing expectations of what was going to happen within the season. I can tell you … it was never intentionally meant to mislead anybody.”

AMC’s goal with “The Killing” was to take a familiar genre (the crime show) and approach it in a different way. “I think we got there,” Stillerman says, “but we definitely didn’t manage expectations the way they should have been managed. … I think it would have been a very different scenario had people not been so convinced they were going to find out.”

That, by the way, will happen next season: “You will find out who killed Rosie in Season 2,” Stillerman says. “Definitively.”